Maudlin Doll
by Vashagud
Summary: She knows about the tender breakable hearts of men, and the gunsmoke, dirt and arithmetic that make it something she can fight. Marlene centric. Some Marlene/Reno. Dark themes.


One day there was no one she could be left with, and so she had picked out a blue dress for herself, shook her hair out wildly and let it hang so it curled around her shoulders. She felt warm. Her daddy always made trips out, for stuff for his arm. That time she got to go. That time she began to understand why, because when he was an aisle over, she held a bunch of bullets in her hand.

They were solid, shiny and cold and she knew what they could do.

She knew because when the three silver brothers had come that one time, the quiet one that never said anything, he made the most dangerous, fantastic noise and it echoed through the forest. He tossed his shiny hair, and spoke through the cold barrel. But when she was thirteen she cradled a cold barrel in her hand, there was an ache in her heart that told her it was right.

She learned that the ends justified the means, and knew it even at six, watching the news and the streaming of all the casualties from when the ShinRa building went down. She knew good ends came even when the means left you dirtier afterwards, when day after day she watched Tifa upkeep the garden in the church, and night after night, Cloud clutched at and buried his face deep in what weren't even Aerith's flowers anymore.

She understood growing up, that men had tender, ferocious hearts too weak to love in a certain way, if the heart was ever broken once. Broken any more after that, you had to just keep subtracting the capacity. It was math. She was good at math. Because Cloud with Aerith cancelled out Tifa, even if Tifa had already cancelled out herself and decided to add in the liquor downstairs.

She knew that her Daddy loved her, but knew some ghost she couldn't see was dividing the love up poorly between long stretches she stayed with Cloud and Tifa, long stretches with Elmyra, and the times she actually saw his face. And she knew the times she was away his love was somehow greater than when she was actually there with him.

She didn't ever want to fall in love and die and do that to a man. But Denzel's mother did. She left him, and he woke up nights, screaming. She didn't care to remember her parents if that was what it was like. It seemed that feeling anything wasn't worth the pain, and that was what she told herself when Denzel kissed her on the mouth at ten, her neck at twelve and muttered drunkenly-because the liquor cabinet locks were easy to pick, if not completely open-at fifteen that he loved her.

And he didn't understand her rationale when she said no, but she was just trying not to lose her heart. He didn't understand why she didn't want him, like everyone else, he said, like everyone else. But it wasn't true, and when he went driving off on Cloud's bike one day and didn't come back, she knew that was exactly the reason why. Denzel had learned how to run.

She went back to that old place at sixteen years old and got herself a gun. She fixed herself a drink at the lonely bar, made sweet for a child's pallette. She wanted to do something big, she somehow knew she would, as she sild her fingers down the barrel and shook her hair, did all the math in her head that made her ambition a crazy, dangerous thing that fit under all that was necessary for the best end.

And like a light, a shadow threw itself across the floor, slinking quiet with bright blue eyes and bright red hair. He looked so old, but somehow the same.

She wasn't a little girl anymore, he said, she knew. She moved around the bar, assuming at this point his heart had probably been broken in that inevitable, irreversible way, but she didn't want it anyway. Especially the doting, selfish one of an old man.

He said he wasn't an old man, put his electromag on the counter, and took her hips to his. She imagined Tifa or Cloud or her father walking in on the picture they made, but knew it was never going to happen. The bar was quiet like the night outside.

There on the barstool, she parted her legs, as she had done for no one. This was the means, she thought, listening to him breathe, screwing her nose up against the pain, saying that she wasn't ever going to fall in love, as he laughed and huskily called her _baby._

After he finished, it was strange the way she just knew where and how to press the gun against his throat. He only looked amused though, and she didn't really know what she was doing, she just felt more lost than she remembered being.

And he told her she could find herself easily in a blue suit like his. And she unlocked her legs and asked him what she had to do.

"You can't be Marlene though, you know? You gotta change into something else."

And she knew that was completely fine, because she'd been doing that her whole life.


End file.
